Due to the large volume of the content available in information systems these days, there is a need to display the content to end users in a structured and intuitive way. For example, the information on a news website has to be classified before it can be displayed to the user. So, the news regarding software companies may appear under the category “News→Industry News By Industry→Infotech→Software” in a particular news website. In another news website, it may be classified as “News→Technology→Software”. Such classifications however may not agree with a user's own preferences or interests. Therefore, it may be time consuming for the user to find the news of his interest in different websites.
While content classification is an important tool to manage complexity, very often it can become the source of further complexity to the end user. Consider another situation, wherein a company portal containing organizational information is migrated from one version to another or is frequently updated causing the information to be moved from one category to another. This causes inconvenience to the employees as they have to search for the information. The paucity of time available to employees does not allow them to spend time learning the content classification mechanism to use it effectively. As a result, inefficiency in information dissemination and productivity losses occur.
Personalization features available in the current user interfaces is typically limited to features such as changing the position of the user interface elements, changing the colors of the user interface elements, changing the font of the text and changing a type of the charts displayed. Basically, the personalization feature is just limited to the features that are provided by the user interface itself and cannot accommodate all preferences of a user.